Annie Bloom's Gift Cards

Beyond Books

My Name Is Lucy Barton (Large Print / Library Binding)

Staff Reviews

As a water skipper glides across a summer still pond, teeming beneath it's surface, held aloft by the surface tension, so this beautiful novel gracefully moves across the life of Lucy Barton, gradually testing it's depths. Lucy is a young woman living in NYC during the 1980s, married with two beloved young daughters, yet in virtual exile from her home in the rural Midwest. She is confined to a solitary hospital room for over two months with an unidentifiable infection. One day she wakes to find her estranged mother sitting at he foot of her bed. There is a sweet bravery in her mothers presence and in her gently squeezing Lucy's toes and using her childhood name "Wizzle". The hesitant give and take inevitably deepens into the tension beneath the surface. It is at times sad, but never ugly; and always riveting.

— Bobby

January 2016 Indie Next List

“Strout has the incredible ability to take ordinary, even mundane situations and use them to make acute observations on the human condition. A mother's visit to her daughter in the hospital becomes the vehicle for an astute examination of daily needs, desires, yearnings, wishes, and dreams that become so much of the remembered experience. Using spare, precise, but beautiful language, she has produced another masterpiece in a growing list of impressive work.”
— Bill Cusumano (M), Square Books, Oxford, MS

Description

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lies the tension and longing that has informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.